Please look at my edited comments at the bottom of this review


I was given this book to read through the Making Connections, ARR: Science Fiction Group, thank you. I believe the author still has copies of this book available for read and review here: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/883688-315-amalgam-the-valaran-chronicles-bo...

The book blurb does a pretty good job about telling what this book is about, so I won’t go into much detail about that.



First off the cover, I absolutely love it! It has got to be one of my favorite covers I’ve seen here on Goodreads. I love the larger image of Hobs and the glow in the background. I also love that the fonts used for the title and author are smaller, using an appropriate color and in a nice placement position. So many books use a font that is not the correct size, or the correct style, or color. This cover does everything well.

I was a little surprised this was labeled a YA book. It reads as a YA book, but then there is a disturbing sex scene in the book that for me, took it into the Adult realm. Despite the story’s tone reading as a YA, for those who don’t like adult content in YA books, be warned that there is explicit content in this book.

Amalgam is told through multiple points of view. The author keeps these POV’s cleanly separated and precise, so the reader never has any trouble with figuring out who’s POV it is or when the POV changes. It made the book much more pleasant to read because I wasn’t confused at any point. I wish more authors could do POV changes as well as this author did.

My favorite character in this story was Archon, the intelligence that ran the facility. My next favorite character was Hobs after he’d been trained by Archon into the Valaran he always should have been. Hobs was a BAMF after that, and he’d found his true calling. I’m curious if Hobs will find any other Valaran on his planet, or if he’ll need to leave the planet and hopefully find a lost settlement of Valaran that escaped the Scarian slaughter.

The story was a bit slow going for about the first forty pages. There wasn’t much happening except a lot of inner dialogue and description of Hob’s life and the town he lived in. Usually stories start with some sort of action to get the reader drawn in quickly, but that wasn’t the case with this book. I was beginning to wonder when the story would pick up and finally it did after about fifty pages.

The writing is smooth and easy to read. It’s not the kind of writing that swallowed me into the story and made me feel part of the action. I felt like I was reading it slightly from the outside, but not so much that I couldn’t enjoy it.

In conclusion, this was a well-planned out book. It’s easy to read, although a bit slow at the start. It didn’t draw me deeply into the story, but I still found the style of writing pleasant.

EDIT: The author went to a lot of trouble fixing the font issues I mentioned in my original review so that I am now revising the star rating to 5 stars because that was the only real issue I had about the book.



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